


i saw three ships come sailing in

by macha



Series: Georgia on My Mind [8]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-07
Updated: 2007-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:46:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macha/pseuds/macha





	i saw three ships come sailing in

###  _A02.11.03 Age of Home: in the hoard, we are harvest._

and the name of the tale is:

### i saw three ships come sailing in

The world's a boneyard, that's what the dragons say. And even the bones turn dust at last. But we know different: sometimes the dusting's only the beginning of the tale.

It was after the end of our world. On Gurnenthar's day, the festival of Ascendance. We've been celebrating that one since way back in the Magic Box days; we used to laugh about it, try to guess what this unknown Gurnenthar, so oddly not mentioned in Giles' books but apparently well-known to the denizens of Willie's Bar, might have done to earn Ascendance. One year i remember Willow made the sign, and pretended that was evidence, and so we all swore up and down he must have been translated into or from a mayfly. Spike, being still pretty evil in spite of our best efforts, refused for years to tell us the real story, just because he could.

But now we know rather more about not only Gurnenthar but also the nature of Ascendance than we used to. In the Hellmouth days Buffy used to specialize in stopping laidly worms and all their kin from Ascending. Cordelia, well, the story goes she ascended once but it ended badly. But sometimes it seems like the older we get, the less we know, and accepting that's a good thing, i think. There are definitely more things on heaven and earth than once were dreamt of in our philosophy. Have we ascended? What would it take? We're much too busy doing what we do to stop and look.

Anyway, right about then we needed all the festive occasions we could get. It was not-quite three years after Earth came to an end so suddenly. And a whole lot of Post-Apocalyptic Shock symptoms remained. Plus there was still a fair bit of tension between those who were going and those who had opted to stay. A lot of people argued that all the resources should be kept in one box, and some thought that box should have been all for those who opted to stay on Home, while others were certain the box should have been stamped fight-the-good-fight Galactic. Funny the differences between the way our fight or flight responses play out, from one to another.

A lot of built-families made in the war and back further to when i was growing up on the Sunnydale Hellmouth got translated in our snowglobe jump. And a lot more developed in the shock that followed losing the world we stood on. It created the need to work together at starting over quick, and it dredged up some OldSkool cultural imperatives we might have in other circumstances thought as a race we'd left behind. There was an instant baby boom, for instance, as if the pressure to rebuild the race devolved on everyone in some immediate way. Which, mind you, it did.

And then some of those families fractured when we ended up with two unmixy missions: either to stay and protect the race, or to leave that safe haven we were building in order to try to protect the stars. Giles and Xander and Anya, for instance, had all chosen to stay, and specifically to live out mortal lives. Though we weren't quarrelling, in our hearts of hearts we hoped they'd have chosen otherwise, and the fact that they were pretty focussed on Home's reconstruction issues meant that we were already not spending nearly as much time with them as we used to do. It must have been particularly hard on Georgia to leave her family behind, though she didn't say much; she only asked them to send on to her, once they were grown, those children who wanted to live beyond the stars. But dragons do mate for life, so she too was leaving those she loved behind in order to go with us.

Buffy and Willow and Georgia in particular worked really hard on both Councils, Home and Ship, to try to keep the gap between the two groups from getting any wider. The fact was, we couldn't guarantee security for the planet, even though it was carefully hidden, if the starfarers and the planetbound continued to stay in contact with one another, so everyone did agree that the break when the Ship left needed to be clean. That way danger would travel with us away from Home's location. And time and communications, of course, in space, would move much more slowly for Shipworld than for the planetbound anyway, so it's not like those on the Ship could stop in for visits with them every once in a while, since if they did everyone they knew and loved would be long since gone.

And truth to tell there was also a lot of flak right then about who Buffy and Spike and Georgia chose specifically to call in the First Ceremony. It wasn't like everyone wanted to be immortal (they so didn't, and that included those who were ChosenToos - in fact it even included those who were immortal already, the big exception to the rule being as usual Spike). The ship would carry all kinds of mortals, to deliver what they were and what they knew into the stars, but as we went we'd lose them to the settlements everywhere we landed, and pick up more to carry with us to the next destination too; and that was because we were determined to seed planets with practical skills and intel and even culture, not to merely fight rearguard actions with them as we went. But the wisdom of whom they'd called to sit on the permanent Ship Council, already known as the Twice Seven, was still being hotly debated, even as both Councils sincerely tried to move forward on both short and longterm goals that would further both enterprises.

Spike says that Georgia was always interested in Darla, even before the War. Her connections, her whereabouts, her history. He never asked her why, which is totally typical. On Earth, most people looked on alignments as black and white. Buffy just says "they had that luxury, then" and leaves it like that. Even at fifteen Buffy's world was never so simple, and yet she had to make her own assessments in an instant all the time. Georgia's whole way of thinking doesn't seem to even include these kinds of questions. People or dragons, they're hers or else they're not. It might be like that with Illyria too. Not so far, come to think of it, from Spike's own view, even before he had that pesky soul.

But the stickiest moments, on the diaspora end, were over the issue of angels. Because they were something new, and a lot of people worried that Georgia might somehow have got the whole thing wrong, in which case taking them on would have meant imperilling the venture, literally before it got off Home ground. Willow looked into it afterwards, once she and Illyria had actual subjects to investigate in their labs. And we've learned a thing or two over the years. So we do know now much more about it, physiologically, than we did at the time.

An Angel in mythology is a messenger; they mediate between Earth and Sky. They weigh the scales. It's not clear whether the Master knew about Darla's potential when he offered her eternal life and gave her a name; and Darla herself remembers nothing of her life before. It's possible, even, that she herself _was_ the purpose of the Order of Aurelius, but if it was she was never told. The Master sent her often out on Aurelian business, but he never gave her much in the way of instructions about how to deal with what or who she met with there. So she followed her own bent, which given Darla may have been enough. And she was always in possession of the Keys; she knew where all the Libraries and all the boltholes were, and she had a lot of stashes of her own, where she kept her stuff. Like black hole hope chests, maybe; certainly most of them were accessible through portals into other worlds.

The existence of Darla's hoards was kind of a fairy tale that became known to the dragons trapped on the Earthside of all those portals, so perhaps they could smell them too. There were some treasure hunters of the dragon persuasion, all right, but their big problem was that at the time there was no Darla. What we call flippantly Ghost World wasn't a dimension they could get to, because all Darla had to do was not to answer when they invited her to appear, and as for getting there no dragons need apply. And neither Dru nor Spike had ever had the Keys. Luckily, whatever the hunters knew, they didn't know about me. And when the earth went poof, which the dragons weren't expecting any more than we were, so did the portals on Earthside.

But Georgia and Spike were already friends. In fact she probably kept the dragons from his doors, though she never said so. Somewhere in the Last Years then she'd drawn some kind of map based on Darla's movements over the years, off both the little he told her and the clues she found when she retraced Darla's steps. She couldn't get in either, and nobody told Georgia about me, but she knew where a number of portals were, and she knew where they went on the other side, because Georgia lives in a lot more dimensions than we do. So when the portals poofed, the boltholes themselves remained intact in their Elsewhere. And when the world ended, Darla in Ghost Dimension wasn't affected. Neither was Dru, for that matter, because at the time she'd accepted an invitation to travel through a portal and join a Wild Hunt taking place offplanet, just for fun.

The way Willow explains it, the genetics have some parallels in human biology. In this case Darla was the first messenger. Her hormones were capable of blnding to the membrane-associated cell surface receptor, and in this case that would be Angel. It's a great overturn that rather defines the pair of them, because Darla was his sire, and it means that biologically she nailed him rather than the other way around. She bound him, like a hedge witch, like he was Merlin, by threading herself through the plasma membrane. This yielded first Dru and Spike as first-prototype versions of a second messenger, sired in their turn down the line in the approved vampiric fashion. But then finally (what with Angel's moment of perfect despair), Darla's efforts began or begat a whole different story, in which Connor was conceived more or less in the human style out of two vampires in no possible way built for procreation. And Connor as second messenger was a true copy she could carry in her dead womb to maturity right up to the moment of birth.

In nature, in our human nature that is, it's called signal transduction, the whole process. Second messengers created by the binding go on to trigger a series of molecular interactions that alter the physiologic state of the cell. So DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA. Darla's version of the progesterone hormone passed through the membrane and enabled the production of genetic material. The key value for the signal strength was that hormone concentration (and i don't wonder about that, now that i know Darla so much better), which slowly affected gene transcription: inductors of gene expression, that's the legacy she had to offer, nearly four hundred years after she died. Then feedback inhibition in the hormones kicked in to avoid the problem of overproduction. Should we call it love, if what the mother's made of acts in spite of herself to protect the child?

As a method, transcription proceeds by translating the genetic code, so compared to the human method (DNA replication) it yields a lower copying fidelity. But Darla's copy, Connor, was perfect. Kicking and screaming about the injustice of the whole thing, she brought the child to term without a soul in sight. But then she staked herself to birth him. Connor was born on Gurnenthar's Day, in an alley, as his mother turned to dust in Angel's hands. The First Messenger earned her Ascendance the hard way, in a single moment of time. But Angel had never told Connor about his mother. It was Illyria who had to tell him in the end; since Fred was there that night.

Who knows what The Master might have known or thought about Darla's art of seduction/reproduction, and about how she played it out? But it's easy to see why she might have been a good candidate, if that's what he was aiming at with his Aurelian line. If the whole plan was his, though, I doubt he'd want her doing what she did with it. Buffy, however, had ground his bones to dust on the Hellmouth well before Connor came along. The Master was aiming at his own version of Ascendance at the time, but the Slayer had other ideas. And when The Master lost to Buffy (which was _after_ he killed her), Angel had already staked Darla; she wasn't supposed to be able to come all the way back, until later on she did. So all The Master had left to work with at the time was that Child he turned near the end to serve as his successor, and Spike's the one who put paid to that one with his little Ode to Sunlight. Spike's always the Wild Card in everybody's deck, including my sister's.

At any rate, Georgia asked Buffy to go talk to Darla, because she wanted to call her. Buffy didn't want to go, but she came back thoughtful, and withdrew all her objections. Then Georgia went to see her too, and all she said about that was that she had given her back the Keys to all her kingdoms, with no strings attached. Which at the time rather caused a sensation of its own, though nobody quite understood back then what an amazing gesture that was in itself, from any dragon.

Connor didn't have a word to say all the way through about these negotiations. He hates surprises. Hope is a virus, he said, but i can translate pretty easily by now the expression in his eyes. He thinks he can't afford it. He never talks about his father either. It was hard for him, all of it, from start to finish. The rest of us were still so close, and in our company he just felt more disconnected. His father was gone, and he'd never known his mother. And Illyria and Spike, the only ones left of the old Angel Investigations team, tried to treat him like family, but given the two of them i think he felt more like Jimmy Olson in their vicinity.

I can't say when exactly I fell in love with him. I'm not sure how to describe what happened between us. He grounded me. I grounded him. Nobody went up in smoke. We were both surprised. And there it was, a done deal, without going any deeper into it than that. Maybe it's all biology. It wasn't at all the same with Andrew later, and that's as much as I know about that. But when I saw Connor fight, I realized that there were parts of himself he didn't want to integrate, that he didn't even like to meet. It's the only part of himself he felt he needed to withhold even from me. And he wasn't willing to have children; when you don't know what you're made of, or indeed what you're for, that's rather a bigger risk than you're willing to take.

I never really knew his father; really, i remember Angel a lot more vividly from the early implanted memories of the days when Buffy and Willow spelled him out of the house, and Jenny died, and Buffy ran away from home. But I don't tell him that, and anyway it was long ago. I do remember clearly that when I met Connor by chance, the day I started at Oxford, his father had left him a message on his blackberry, and he got that tiny smile he does when he's really pleased. But it wasn't long after that Angel and Spike went on their ill-fated dragon hunt, and that was the end of that.

On the morning of Gurnenthar's Day that year, we'd slept in the pavilion tent we'd pitched next to the Big Canteen, near the lake, to hold a little party for Tara, who had finally arrived. As it wound down we laid the presents out, and sampled the cookies and nog the children offered up to Gurnenthar, and in the end we fell asleep by the fire. When Georgia woke us up, she didn't say why. Probably a good thing she didn't pick Tara to nuzzle, but Tara was sleeping safely in Willow's arms. It was daybreak; the suns were just coming up, bleeding into their own reflections in the water on the other side of the lake. We came down to the dock, still sleepy. It was the kind of morning that you don't want to say a word into, in case it breaks the spell. Impossibly perfect, even in terms of a lifetime that's already impossibly long by earth standards. The air was still and cool; the lapping of the water was amplified by the silence. You could see across the lake for miles into those rising red suns. You could see forever.

And in that spectacular setting a dot on said horizon gradually resolved into a large sailboat coming towards us at an angle from across the lake, pulling a barge behind it. Both vessels were sitting low in the water, they were so heavily laden. On the sailboat the billowing sails were cream and red; so was the Lady. This was the way Darla, now still serving as First Messenger to every receptor world we meet, chose to make her entrance, onto another stage in which she would play a very different part from her usual turn. The ship towed the barge on which, lying in state like dead Ophelia or the Lady of Shalott, Drusilla lay on her back with her arms crossed on her unbeating heart, following serenely after her grandmother whom she also calls her child. Both ships sailed slowly into dockside, as though it was all a dream. The name of the sailboat read Dear Boy. The barge was called the Pirate Jenny.

There was no rudder on either vessel, and there was no wind to catch those sails. Spike and Buffy strolled down to the dock as though it was an ordinary day. My sister grabbed the rope when Darla threw it, and tied the sailboat to the dock. Then Connor finally moved from beside me to offer his hand to his mother; Spike offered his to Drusilla. They both stepped elegantly across the gap in time and space onto our dock. One gained a son, the other acquired a baby brother. Family is such a complicated thing; it crosses every boundary line. It was the first time Connor and Darla had ever touched.

Then Georgia landed by the water the starship she'd promised, and past met future. Willow produced homegrown champagne; Buffy did the bottle breakage at the christening. The ship's name was Revello Drive; the meadow called Sunnydale turned out to be amusingly retractable, and Georgia had even somehow managed to retrieve Spike's favorite sign. All of us toured the ship; since after all we all meant to live there together until the end of time, and maybe after. Georgia looked in at the windows to see us all exploring, exclaiming about this and that. Spike assured us she was beaming, in spite of the fact that she really looked alarming. Darla and Drusilla didn't look at all alarming. Faith, hope, and charity, if you think about it, may still apply.

Then we did the cargo offload. The kids opened their own presents; we needed crowbars to open ours. Darla had chosen to bring everything she had acquired in a long and notably acquisitive life. She knew what to store, what to bargain with, what resources we would need to keep. There were carpets from Samarkand, and the whole lost library from Alexandria; there were jewels and gold and paintings rolled up in oilcloth from a world now gone, grimoires and calling cards and maps to galaxies the human race had never even named. It was the dowry of a queen, in exchange for something she could never purchase: a life she could bear to remember, a place from which to begin again, her unique gifts respected and valued in a world of constant change, and more than one family to love and keep. And all the angels in Heaven shall sing. Signal transduction, isn't that how it works?: the binding triggers interactions, which produce an altered state. Like a new species, for instance, able to breed true. I can attest to that. So out of darkness, light.

I saw three ships come sailing in, on Gurnenthar's Day in the morning. And all the souls on earth shall sing. We shall remember for them all we lost and everything we've made. Exiled by choice from paradise, we will continue, both in memory and in the everyday. We will be measured in the end not by what we lose, but by what we choose to keep. This is our version of ascendance, seeding the galaxies with life, reverse-engineering entropy in the nets we cast ever wider into the starsea deep while we are endlessly together engaged in recreating the act, the art, of coming home.


End file.
